Tennant is manager, eScholarship Web & Services Design, California Digital Library, as well as founder and manager of the electronic discussion lists Web4Lib and Current Cites. His column focuses on the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), a standard developed within the digital library community for distributing metadata for digital objects.

Although the standard was developed around metadata for papers in e-print repositories, Jeff Young has developed several innovative implementations, including use with an online thesaurus, digital-library usage logs, and the OpenURL registry. These implementations are described in an article in D-Lib Magazine, "Using the OAI-PMH...Differently" (July/August 2003).

Building on these activities, Jeff has also developed the OAI Viewer, which allows users to browse through the metadata of any OAI-compliant repository using available OAI verbs, and ERRoLs, which are URLs to metadata, content, and services related to registered OAI repositories.